Gill tells Business Insider NASA data critical to climate change research

University of Maine paleoecologist and plant ecologist Jacquelyn Gill told Business Insider that NASA data on Earth’s climate provides a critical baseline of comparison, as she and other researchers study climate change over millions of years. Last month, Bob Walker, an adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, told The Guardian newspaper that the incoming administration was preparing to shift funding at NASA away from Earth science and toward greater exploration of deep space. But Gill says such a move would harm climate change research. “A lot of the work we do in the past is motivated by the world we have in the present,” Gill told Business Insider. “If we don’t have that information then [the past data] becomes a kind of novelty. It loses its grounding.”